Carbon Pricing and Environmental Federalism

This weekend I attended the Carbon Pricing and Environmental Federalism conference in Kingston, Ontario. This meeting, organized by Queen's University's Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, brought together many of Canada's experts in the field of public policy on climate change.

Needless to say, Stephane Dion, the Green Shift and the recent election were not far from everybody's thoughts. The mood was a bit somber in this respect as exemplified by Prof. Kathryn Harrison of UBC, a political scientist, who said that with last week's vote, optimistically, action in Canada on climate change will be pushed back by at least ten years. Various people had unkind words for the NDP and the Conservatives for campaigning against the Green Shift with misinformation and scare tactics. More than one person told me that the best use of my time now, as an activist, would be to talk to kids, with the sad implication that changing the minds of older generations, as a whole, was a lost cause (although as a younger person and somewhat of a kid-at-heart, I am not willing to give up so quickly).

Economist Nancy Olewiler (an organizer of the letter signed by 250 economists during the election campaign supporting a carbon tax) of SFU, however, amid her own observations of the difficulties that the fight against climate change faces, did say that we should celebrate one thing: that the recent federal election in Canada was the first Canadian election where pricing policy (as opposed to voluntary initiative or incentives) for carbon emissions was a major issue.

Climate change will be challenging us for a long long time. How to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be a political issue for a long long time. As long as we have a market economy, the price of emissions, however it is generated, will also be a political issue. And so I think that Canadians will be talking about Stephane Dion and the Green Shift for many years to come.

Stephane Dion put a clear policy forward for carbon pricing as a first step to combat climate change. It was supported by environmentalists and economists. It was roughly in line with the Green Party's proposal, and it was based an old idea going back in the political arena at least as far as a policy proposal by a US Republican party presidential candidate in 1979, John Anderson, and implemented in one form or another in many countries since then.

In my opinion we are indebted to Stephane Dion for bringing some intellectual honesty to Canadian politics. Perhaps his mistake was to be so honest as to call a tax a tax. One of the conclusions of this conference was that, politically, Canadians are not ready for that. Conference participants concluded that we should never again associate carbon emissions pricing with the word "tax", and simply disguise it with names such as, "cap and trade", "public benefit funds", "renewable portfolio standard", or "foreign oil security fee".

I believe that history will show that Mr. Dion should be accorded more respect than he has been receiving from certain (close) quarters in the last week. We need more people like him in Canadian politics.